February 12, 2018

"When Columbia settled the lawsuit filed by the man Sulkowicz accused of rape, it put out a statement, noting that his 'remaining time at Columbia became very difficult for him and not what Columbia would want any of its students to experience.' But Sulkowicz believes that what he went through had a salutary effect. 'He’s been scared shitless,' they said.*... 'It’s about finding a way to make your institution, and the people who run it, more human.'"

I'm interested in the enthusiasm for harsh punishment and for deterring bad behavior by scaring people shitless. That's the common stereotype of a right-wing mindset. Most of that New Yorker article is about understanding the behavior of college students and tracking them away from bad sex, that is, looking for root causes, which is the classic mindset of the liberal. Torentino asked Sulkowicz about that approach (which led to a program at Columbia called "SHIFT"):

Sulkowicz had not heard about SHIFT before, and was politely resistant to the idea: “My view in this whole thing is that, the more that Columbia can retreat behind ‘Here’s a program, here’s a study, here’s a process,’ the less that any human that finds themselves in this machine will ever be incentivized to act based on their moral compass.”

What if, I asked, the idea behind the study was tinkering with the machine, figuring out how to reorient that moral compass?

“That makes me think of asking someone to wash the dishes, and they tell you, ‘I’ll try,’” Sulkowicz said. “I think that’s the difference between spending two million dollars to try to understand the conditions that create a community that’s conducive to sexual assault versus just doing the right thing—expelling people who sexually assault other students.”

* I was confused at "they said," even though I'd read, earlier in the article (and had not forgotten) that Sulkowicz "identifies as non-binary, and uses the gender-neutral pronouns 'they' and 'them,'" and I had already struggled with confusion when I read "in the midst of sex, the student anally penetrated and choked them while they struggled and told him to stop" and "carrying a fifty-pound, twin XL mattress around campus... was a performance project: they would stop carrying it, they said, when the student who had raped them was expelled."

110 comments:

Remember when Mitt Romney said - I like contractors because I can fire them! - remember they? Isn’t they what she’s saying here? Don’t let your rules or process get in the way of me punishing someone, dammit.

The conservative approach by a university would be to fire all the functionaries and bureaucrats, tell the students they are all adults, and to make their own arrangements as they see fit, as adults do.

This case is the perfect justification for segregating men and woman into separate colleges. Or better yet going online and firing thousands of worthless professors and selling off college campuses to the highest bidder. Maybe we can make them into animal shelters or something useful.

I hope President Trump goes back to the well and taxes the shit out of the endowments of these shithead factories in the ivy league.

The plural used for one person makes me think of the man called Legion in the Bible:

Mark 5:1-20

They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes.[a] 2 When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came from the tombs to meet him. 3 This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. 4 For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. 5 Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.

6 When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. 7 He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God’s name don’t torture me!” 8 For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of this man, you impure spirit!”

9 Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”

“My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.” 10 And he begged Jesus again and again not to send them out of the area.

11 A large herd of pigs was feeding on the nearby hillside. 12 The demons begged Jesus, “Send us among the pigs; allow us to go into them.” 13 He gave them permission, and the impure spirits came out and went into the pigs. The herd, about two thousand in number, rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.

14 Those tending the pigs ran off and reported this in the town and countryside, and the people went out to see what had happened. 15 When they came to Jesus, they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons, sitting there, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. 16 Those who had seen it told the people what had happened to the demon-possessed man—and told about the pigs as well. 17 Then the people began to plead with Jesus to leave their region.

And now she is a bondage performance artist, whose "art" consists of being roped and suspended in her underwear for all to bask at. Not going to link, since we all know how to use search engines. Remind me of the annual cost of Columbia?

I seem to remember Gollum also referring to himself in the plural...because he had a split personality.The idea that men should be scared shitless of a woman changing her mind does not lead to trust and love, which are the necessary parts of a relationship.

@langford - I think you're mixed up. They were "friends with benefits" for a while. Then she let him into her @ss in the hopes of getting promoted to "girlfriend" (though she didn't even articulate that clearly). When he declined to change her status, and remained just bud with bennies, she pretended to be cool for a while, but when she saw that he was getting together with other girls, she snapped and made her accusation.

Typical prog attitude: doing the right thing = expulsion. Their "moral compass" always comes down to the exercise of power.

Unless we can have an honest conversation about why a young woman would offer anal sex to a young man she barely knows, and what the moral merits of such an action are, we will not improve our "compass." We can't, so we won't.

Making campus "safer" is an institutional copout, for lack of actual consensus about actual sexual morality. I wonder if they'll make the campus safe from future Mattress Girls.

When I went off to college in 1961, my father took me aside and warned me to beware of “predatory females”. He wasn’t more specific, but I think he was referring to women who would use sex to rope a young man with good prospects into matrimony. So I avoided that. In these days of hook-ups and casual sex, his advice would be urgently useful to young men today, although the threat is different.

Old Mattress Back got what she wanted. Lord preserve all young men from vengeful young harpies. People sometimes get into bed together because it seemed like a good idea at the time, or because one or both of them was high or drunk. And then they wake up--and wonder how they got there.

Despite the old joke about a guy escaping from coyote ugly woman (she may look good on the outside, but have this woman's personality on the inside) he can't just chew off his arm.

OTOH if she has regrets an hour, a day, a week, a month, or several years later, she can make his life hell.

Ann - the man's name wasn't Legion - it is the evil spirits possessing him which respond.

The whole Sulkowicz story is so disturbing that I try to avoid it. Not only were her accusations of rape not credible, the path she has been pursuing in life since argues that she may have a formidable level of sexual kink.

At first I thought the accused was not guilty, but a real sexual cad. But Sulkowicz's later behavior has convinced me that no, she was likely the instigator of the unfortunate experience.

'The survey did not use the term “sexual assault”; it asked about “unwanted sexual contact.”' Thank you for your opinion. Some of us think those two are different in important ways.

“That makes me think of asking someone to wash the dishes, and they tell you, ‘I’ll try'"We knew this already, but that woman has no comprehension of how to deal with a man. When you ask a man for a favor, he often needs to work himself up to doing it. Encouragement helps. Being insulted because he didn't jump to his feet hurts the relationship.

the less that any human that finds themselves in this machine will ever be incentivized to act based on their moral compass.”

A moral compass based on what morality? Do moral lives just "happen", or do people have to go through moral formation? Is that moral formation an easy or a difficult process?

As a believing Catholic, I know what my team thinks are the answers to those questions. They're actually pretty much the same as anyone else in the broader Christian or other faith communities. The same as most moral philosophers in the natural law or deontic traditions.

I just have absolutely no idea what the answers are for someone like Ms Sulkowicz.

Do you ever wonder why there was a herd of unclean animals like pigs nearby for Jesus to send the demons into? Who were the pigs meant for -- the Greco-Roman population of Judea? The NT, of course, never makes that clear.

Quite weirdly, they seem to take sexual assault more seriously than Columbia University. Sexual assault is, perhaps, a felony that should be investigated by law enforcement. Except they failed to purse that approach.

So the original complaint about harassment denying equal access was based on quid pro quo sex demands from educators. Now we're supposed to believe student behavior is covered. It's another bait and switch plan.

I think the best action is to repeal Title IX. I doubt there is much meaningful discrimination against women these days, and what does exist would be handled by notifying the paper. Meanwhile academia's support for people attacking men shows both (1) the entire project is a farce of favoritism and (2) the enacted (and therefore only legitimate) purpose will never be part of the program anyway.

Columbia now has twenty-three staffers with Title IX responsibilities,

As Mark indicates, the New Testament makes it quite clear that Jesus is wandering about outside of Judea -- across the sea of Galilea -- in either the regions of the Gerasenes or the territory of the Gadarenes, depending on the Gospel.

researchers received a waiver so that they could promise students confidentiality while engaged in shift research.

Universities have long pointed at Title IX and the Dear Colleague letter to disclaim responsibility for their absurd procedures and outcomes. Who granted this waiver and on what authority? If granted by the school isn't this an admission their posturing is false?

Coincidentally you'll here this called right wing too...in about 20 years when the panic recedes and the left needs to blame it on someone to protect themselves. Crack sentences were originally set high because black community leaders demanded it: cities were racist if they didn't comply. Now that they're racist for agreeing the decision makers have been transformed into right wingers - at least according to American Mythology.

The Left (& by "Left" I mean those to the left of classic liberalism) has always been sexually puritanical. There were "free love" libertines among the revolutionaries in Russia (e.g. the anarchist Emma Goldman) & Lenin shut those folks down in no uncertain terms. The Soviet Union considered homosexuality to be a counter-revolutionary failing, since homosexuality was a social deformation brought about by capitalist decadence.

In the US, far-left authors such as Dashiell Hammett, who created the fictional detective Phillip Marlow later complained that authors such as Mickey Spillane were "pornographers". Members of the CPUSA certainly weren't ascetics, but they also had no problem with expelling someone whose sexual misadventures spilled out into public view. Bill Clinton wouldn't have lasted 30 minutes in the CPUSA.

It wasn't until the American New Left, in the late 50's early 60's, based on the Frankfurt School Marxists, that sexual liberation was identified as a means of struggle against bourgeois repression. In now moving towards greater advocacy of sexual repression, the Left is simply reverting to historical type.

A team of researchers at Columbia believes that small changes to college life could make campuses safer.

The closest we get is this:

The shift approach, for all its rigor and scope, is in some ways remarkably modest: the idea is that small structural adjustments to student life could change how students interact with one another—help them find their moral compass more easily, feel more at home on campus, have some obstacles cleared out of their path.

But this says nothing about how. It seems SHIFT's core is taking really comprehensive surveys. Of course they're creating a new organization which someone gets to put on their resume.

Oh wait, maybe this is it:

Many of these conversations have echoed long-standing conclusions in public-health research, and also what some students are already asking for: more crisis support, more consideration for specific populations, more access to spaces on campus that feel like their own

So this groundbreaking new approach yields exactly the same recommendations which have already proven ineffective.

Here's someone with a clear vision:

“I mean, Columbia, you should want to solve the problem, so you don’t keep having to solve the problem, you know what I mean?”

My personal favorite:

The question now is whether Columbia values shift as a flagship research project or as a practical guide to institutional change. I asked Goldberg, over the phone, whether she thought Columbia would change after shift. She had spoken carefully throughout our conversation, seeming to calibrate every word against the various, sometimes competing interests that she’s expected to balance. “I think,” she said, “that shift’s research is profoundly important to the work we are doing here.”

So they have no idea what they're going to do but they're sure it's profound. Somebody save us.

“Do you ever wonder why there was a herd of unclean animals like pigs nearby for Jesus to send the demons into? Who were the pigs meant for -- the Greco-Roman population of Judea? The NT, of course, never makes that clear.”

I wonder about a lot of things about the story.

Why were 2000 pigs handy right then?

Were they wild pigs?

If each pig killed himself, why didn’t the man, containing that many spirits, kill himself?

Really, he was just one terribly mentally ill man, of course, wasn’t he? And so that one man thought of himself as containing multitudes and called himself Legion and used “we” as his pronoun. Or do you think there were 2000 spirits and they were talking and saying we?

Are you required to reject what I am saying in order to believe Jesus cured him? I don’t think so. Jesus could be seen as accepting the man’s idea of what his problem was, but that may make the use of all those pigs even more puzzling.

Below is a link to Sulkowicz's latest piece of "performance art." Why is her name featured in a New Yorker article on the subject of sexual harassment on campus, and why is Ann linking to said article?

“Why is her name featured in a New Yorker article on the subject of sexual harassment on campus, and why is Ann linking to said article? ”

The story is about a worthy study at Columbia and Sulkowicz was a Columbia student.

I don’t believe the New Yorker article liked the position taken by Sulkowics. The author, I believe, sided with the researchers, who were in the position I.characterized as liberal — not punitive but searching for root causes and remedies.

There's a great deal of study about the drinking and sexual habits of 19-year-olds who expect to be treated as adults but who act like 12-year-olds. They want the university to act in loco parentis when it comes to administering desired vengeance but not to specify rules -- curfews, house mothers, no opposite-sex guests in dorm rooms, no alcohol on campus or at least only beer instead of urns of beer-lemonade-vodka that get people much drunker much faster -- that might protect against such episodes. That's 12-year-old thinking for you, though.

The Mattress Girl acted pretty strangely after her "rape," apparently seeking a relationship and when she (they) didn't get it, demanded the university expel the man to validate her (their) personal feelings. With two psychiatrist parents, you'd hope she'd (they'd) get help and insight instead of plunging into further, ritualized degradation. Apparently this is all she (they) has got, and she (they) plans to make a career of it. Narcissistic, sad and pathetic all at the same time.

I'm not with Columbia here. I believe that being raped by a stranger IS worse than being raped by someone you know -- the difference is that, in the latter case, you have to face yourself and acknowledge what part, however limited, you played in the situation. This is uncomfortable, certainly, but it is work that must be done to better protect yourself in the future.

A consensual encounter on the first day of the school year had turned violent, Sulkowicz alleged: in the midst of sex, the student anally penetrated and choked them while they struggled and told him to stop. (He has consistently maintained that the entire encounter was consensual.)

Sulkowicz represents the alleged rape in an x-rated performance-art video entitled Ceci N'est Pas Un Viol ("This is not a rape”). The video is NSFW and is introduced by a page of text. If you're inclined to click you may want to google the Wikipedia page first.

Sulkowicz is the best argument for why universities should simply say that they are schools, here to teach classes to legal adults, and if those adults can’t get along, they should take it to the police. If it doesn’t rise to a police matter, they should work out their own solutions.

How the university became a moderator of behavior and a source of punishment outside the scope of the judicial system is beyond me.

And the fact is if you have a staff of 23 responsible for Title IX, guess what? They’re going to find a lot of Title IX violations they have to deal with. It’s what they’re paid to do, so how could they do otherwise?

If the colleges really wanted to deal with this problem, there were be mandatory single sex dorms and no alcohol could be served on campus or in dorms with threat of expulsion if one either has a person of the opposite sex in the wrong dorm or one drinks in the dorm.

There is 80% of these nonsense problems.

Will the Left allow such measures to be enacted. Well...yes!

But only

1) If THEY do the enforcing, not because it's mandated by anyone else,

and certainly

2) it can only be used to afflict men. Women will NOT be expelled from campus for any reason whatsoever. Who else with the Male Professors perv at?

I remember one of her parents serving up commentary that had a strangely sympathetic tone towards the "rapist".I also remember discovering her her Linkedin saying she is a former "collegiate marketing manager at Billy Boy USA"http://www.billy-boy.us/about/"Germany's #1 condom brand"

FIDO:"If the colleges really wanted to deal with this problem, there were be mandatory single sex dorms and no alcohol could be served on campus or in dorms with threat of expulsion if one either has a person of the opposite sex in the wrong dorm or one drinks in the dorm.

There is 80% of these nonsense problems."

But they don't want to solve the problem. They want to remake society.

a root cause just might be a culture that sends a ton of mixed signals about sex

Not limited to sex. A Pro-Choice religion is, by design, internally, externally, and mutually inconsistent, which is a first-order forcing of progressive confusion, corruption, and dysfunction. A persistent, destabilizing source for individuals, family, community, and society. The prerequisite for Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness is self-moderating, responsible behavior.

People who commit rape should not be expelled. They should be imprisoned.

Rape and sex that the woman regret later and not the same thing. While someone might feel unhappy about such an encounter, it isn't a crime, and the person who regrets it should probably refrain from sexual encounters that could cause mental confusion for them in the future.

How the university became a moderator of behavior and a source of punishment outside the scope of the judicial system is beyond me.

Then you are historically challenged. That's what universities all used to do. The current mess started when they stopped. Crazy Jane nailed it above.

But there is no need to return to those paternalistic days. All we need to do is to give some social scientists lots of money to come up with a few "tweaks" to college life and presto, problem all gone. I'm actually pretty sure that if someone gave me a million or two, I could solve crime in the cities with a few simple tweaks to urban life. For another million, I'll share my plan for tweaking daily life in the Middle East.

I wonder about a lot of things about the story....Jesus could be seen as accepting the man’s idea of what his problem was, but that may make the use of all those pigs even more puzzling.

2/12/18, 7:49 PM

Have your little woman dial down the blonde in the dye, it's hurting your brain. Do your really think that in two millennia there has been nothing written to answer these Jack Handey type questions of yours?

IANAC but your mockery only reflects on you. You sound as if you talk because it hurts to be quiet. You sound as if your mouth hangs open when you stop. You sound, not to put too fine a point on it, like you're literally trying to disprove the adage that there is no such thing as a stupid question.

"Were they wild pigs?" Hey, I don't know. Did they have toothbrushes? THE PIGS IGNORED THE TOOTHBRUSHES! THE HERDERS SHOWED THE RECEIPTS! It's like Eggagog IRL.

On the question whether they were wild pigs, you have to consider that you're reading a translation. In other translations, I see:

"Now there was a great herd of swine feeding near the mountains... Those who fed the swine fled and reported it in the city and in the country." That doesn't have herders. There could be a herd in the wild. And there could be people feeding the wild swine. It could be a way to get rid of garbage.

KJV has: "Now there was there nigh unto the mountains a great herd of swine feeding.... And they that fed the swine fled...."

So I'm guessing the word for herders used in other contexts in the New Testament is not in the reference to the people who were interacting with the pigs.

On the question whether the man said his name was Legion or the spirits said it, KJV says: "My name is Legion: for we are many." Why not "Our name is Legion: for we are many"?

Here's an effort to explain some of the puzzles in the pig story. Point #5 ends in the kind of insulting unreasonable tone that shows the nasty side of some people who power themselves with faith:

1. No charge can be made against the Lord unless the event actually happened. Those who censure Christ first of all must concede that this account represents a factual incident; otherwise, their allegation is baseless. Are skeptics willing to admit that Jesus actually cast out demons? If so, exactly what did that phenomenon prove?

2. If Christ is a Divine Being, then He is sovereign over the entire creation and, in reality, everything belongs to Him (cf. Colossians 1:16). God said: “For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills” (Psalm 50:10). Hogs, too!

It is interesting to observe that the demons obviously acknowledged the right of the Savior to use these swine for His own purpose in this episode. Demons have a greater respect for the authority of the Lord than most men! Also, the man himself subsequently worshipped Jesus (Mark 5:6). Does one worship another whom he perceives to be a mere rogue that destroys the property of others? Finally, when the citizens of the region learned of this miraculous feat, they came to where Christ was. Out of fear, they asked him to leave the area.

No appeal was made to the authorities for “arrest” and incarceration! Rather, the people “marveled” (Mark 5:20). Thus, in the interest of a higher good, Christ had every right to allow this incident to occur.

3. According to Old Testament regulations (Leviticus 11), swine were “unclean.” Edmond Hiebert noted that it “is generally assumed that the owners were non-Jewish, but it is possible that Hellenizing Jews, lured by the good market for swine flesh in the cities of the Decapolis, may have engaged in raising pigs for financial gain” (Commentary on Mark, Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 1994, p. 133). If such were the case, the Savior’s economic “rebuke” certainly would have been warranted.

4. The scholarly R.C. Foster once observed that Christ “permitted the destruction of the swine knowing that it would awaken the Gergesenes from their indifference and ultimately assist in the salvation of a multitude in the community” (Studies in the Life of Christ, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1971, p. 599). There are things that transcend the material, and hardship can have a benevolent result in the final ordering of one’s affairs. Who knows how much these folks might have been blessed by the loss of their livestock! Of course the spiritually insensitive cannot appreciate this concept.

5. Anyone who thinks that the value of 2,000 hogs transcends that of a human soul made in the image of God himself (see Matthew 16:26), is so obtuse that likely no argument would be effective in unscrambling the discombobulation within his skull.

" Sulkowicz believes that what he went through had a salutary effect."

If there was an assault here, it appears Sulky herself is guilty of it, of attempting to use all platforms available to her to punish the man she accused even after the college's absurdly biased Title IX procedures exonerated him.

If anyone deserves to be punished (for salutary effect or other reasons) surely it is she.

Hold on a sec - it wasn't Jesus who killed the pigs - it was the demon who entered them that caused them to run off the cliff. Maybe Jesus knew that's what would happen, so there's partial liability. You should have covered this in Torts class, back when you were a prof...

and by the way, somewhere up above Dashiell Hammett was credited with creating Phillip Marlowe. No, that was Raymond Chandler. Hammett created Sam Spade. Neither of whom, to my knowledge, harmed a pig even in fiction. I can't speak to their breakfast choices.

Okay, Madame, I will hazard a response to the Pig Question. Why, or rather What, is the Pig? Why their collective suicide? Why the response of the Elders (representing the economic interests of the Village) did they send him away?

North Israel is rife with wild boar; they've lived there for a very long while. For non Jews, such as the Roman Occupier, there was money in them thar pigs through commissary sales to Roman Legion Garrison mess hall: Bread, Pig, and Wine. Babylonian order.

So, the Elders show up, they see the crazy guy clear standing next to the big carpenter, and decide it's best not to "reason with THEM" telling them to scram.

Pigs are a symbol of impurity as well as deception. Rashi tells us that the Pig sits with her fore paws in front of her pretending to be a kosher animal (the perennial dating problem). The parable tells us of a Mad Man above the village, where the Prophet comes and look over the Valley (read Milton on this) and know what is what. They make a lot of money on these impurities; they probably are not too careful about how they slaughter these beasts let alone giving into the temptation of sampling the wares heading to the eating halls of the uncircumcised (remember, this was BEFORE Paul's leniency on circumcision).

The freed spirits are now purified from the miracle cure of The Prophet. They are in an extreme sense of atonement. They, too, have been redeemed; but, they WILL permit themselves to enter PEOPLE like the pure ones following The Prophet, so they beg to enter the bodies of the impure PIG, allowing to atone for their capital sins (possession is one such) by committing KIDUSH HASHEM (disclosure, I am descended from the Polish Rabbi who wrote the greatest of such prayers the faithful are supposed to say before being killed because of being Jewish) and entering the purifying waters of the Sea of Galley.

Durkheim wrote about such suicides.

Now, back to the Elders. I would have thought that having seen the miracles they would be filled with Awe and repent on the spot.

BUT NO!

Their pissed off. This is north Israel and the people are habituated to Prophets. Prophet, SHMOPHET! Who's going to fulfill the contracts we have with the fucking ROMANS! Hugh, smart boy! Who's going to scare off the robbers, thugs, thieves, and goring beats that descend the mountain by the graveyard now that you have CURED our one man ARMY!

Just GO AWAY! You've done enough damage!

The Prophet, of course, was satisfied and left taking his Protection with him.

The problem with such true believers, as the Good Books tell us, is that we succumb to the violence we search out to destroy. In the movie ZARDOZ, Sean Connery reminds that when we become dragon hunters, we become dragons.

The Left has a horrid propensity to descend into the MOB, something our founding persons abhorred. Dickens wrote of such personalities: Madame La Guillotine.

To me, the most interesting thing in this story isn't what happened to the pigs or even to the demons, it's the fact that the demons address Jesus as "son of the High God". Even Jesus' followers at this point don't recognize him as more than a prophet, but the demons do. It's as though there were a supernatural telegraph that humans couldn't read, but demons and angels could.

There have been more than 180 lawsuits brought by male students who allege that the university violated their due process rights. Most have been decided in favor of the plaintiffs. Would that Emma possessed the skill of risk analysis, and could divine the way university behavior is trending.

I'm interested in the enthusiasm for harsh punishment and for deterring bad behavior by scaring people shitless. That's the common stereotype of a right-wing mindset.

Yes, but those evil right wingers want to punish oppressed third world people who do unimportant little things like murder, armed robbery, or raping women at gunpoint, whereas good, honest liberals want to punish the realcriminals: white males who don't give upper class white women the relationships they want.